"Disorder Here Rages": Sickness, Slavery, and Resistance in Revolutionary South Carolina

Join University Libraries for a talk with Dr. Sean Gallagher, Assistant Professor of History, as he examines how enslaved people navigated epidemics of smallpox, yellow fever, and other diseases during the Revolutionary War. Highlighting documents at the South Caroliniana Library, this talk frames disease as a political phenomenon in Revolutionary Black life. Inoculated military foragers brought pox to unprotected slave quarters; labor impressment circulated sick enslaved people into confined barracks and fortifications. Black women and men in turn came to define their struggle for freedom as a simultaneous struggle for survival against a sickening war.
After the talk, attendees will have the chance to take a tour of University Libraries current exhibit "Echoes of Remembrance: 250 Years of Revolution and Memorialization" during its final months on display.